Viv and I are watching The Two Towers on DVD (we actually started yesterday) and there’s an hour to go.

POINT ONE:
Gollum, as I’ve said before, is looking to me like an ambitious miscalculation. Less than a year after the release of the film, each time I see it, the more flaws and shortcomings in the character’s CGI I see.

This will guarantee reworking of the films once the trilogy is complete – the question is, how long will it be until we see this?

An additional question, of course, is: how much farther will they have pushed the CGI for The Return of the King? The films still obviously reflect a high-caliber commitment to quality; I can’t imagine that effects people and directors on the project are unaware of the issues I see (overly smooth movements, “floating” limbs, ungrounded character presence in certain scenes) and I would assume they were tackling them even before the release of the first film.

POINT TWO:
Geez this is a long film. Apparently, when the extended edition is released in November, we’ll see, as with the first film, an additional forty minutes.

I’m buying stock in lumbar cushion manufacturers.